At the end of Hackaday Superconference weekend, we hold a badge hacking ceremony on the main stage where anyone who has done anything with their badge is invited to come on stage and show off their work. Yes, even if it’s just a blinking LED! It was a tremendous pleasure to see not only people taking us at our word and presented blinking LEDs, but that the community in the room welcomed these inductees to hardware hacking with cheers. Before the ceremony, though, there was a lot of frantic work by badge hackers armed with soldering irons and fueled by caffeine. It’s always amazing how much people can accomplish in a single focused weekend.

In our previous overview of Supercon badge hacking, [macegr] had only an expansion board holding a USB to serial converter out of convenience. It has since grown to an LED array and, by the end of the night, an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. Quite an evolution for something that began as a humble serial converter! Speaking of convenient ports, [Drew] and [Mike L] added a PS/2 keyboard port to their badge. The functionality, however, was only half of the story. The other half was their resourcefulness using parts scavenged from items in the goody bag given to Supercon attendees.

On the other meaning of the word “port”, [Marcel] ported an emulator for his Gigatron TTL computer to run on his badge. [Nick] dove into the Z80 emulator on his badge sporting an enclosure by [Tim]. [Nick]’s goal was to get SuperCalc (one of the original spreadsheet programs) to run. And [SHAOS] worked to port his XORLib project to his badge.

Multiple projects added audio input to the badge. [swap file] fed a microphone into a Teensy which commanded the badge to visualize music on screen along with copious LEDs. [Scott] went a different route – the audio signal is routed to electrodes worn on the skin, allowing the wearer to hear through their skin. We even have a MATRIX Voice microphone array brought by [Tucanae47].

On the output end …read more

Source:: Hackaday